Raising eyebrows and salaries

Monday

Aug 19, 2013 at 12:01 AMAug 19, 2013 at 1:40 PM

On March 8, newly elected Gov. Pat McCrory asked state agencies to freeze salaries as part of an overall belt-tightening plea in order to cover the state’s Medicaid shortfall. At the same time he asked department heads to refrain from big purchases and cut back on travel.

Reasonable requests, each and every one. After all, North Carolina, like nearly every state these days, is trying to escape from a financial hole. McCrory and his Republican counterparts in the General Assembly were elected largely on such promises to rein in state spending.

Then something weird happened. A little more than three weeks later, two former McCrory campaign staffers were given hefty raises for state-paid positions in which their qualifications are suspect at best.

Actually what occurred isn’t all that weird. Paying back campaign operatives with government jobs is a sad tradition common to both major parties. But the promotions and raises given in this instance puts McCrory on the kind of path traveled by predecessors like Democrat Mike Easley. It also puts McCrory seemingly in conflict with the austere spending principles that were the cornerstones of his campaign for governor.

According to the Associated Press, Matthew McKillip worked for McCrory’s campaign for a year before landing a government job in January when McCrory took office. On April 8, McKillip, who has no experience in health-related fields and no academic degrees in that area, was promoted to the job of chief policy adviser for Health and Human Services Secretary Aldona Wos. His new job pays $87,500 a year, a raise of $22,500.

On April 1, Ricky Diaz was moved to the job of communications director for the Department of Health and Human Services with a salary of $85,000 annually, a bump of $23,000 from the state job he was given in January. Before that, he worked on McCrory’s campaign and prior to that, the campaign of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. He studied economics at Vanderbilt. It’s not the usual path to a communications director post in a department as important and detailed as Health and Human Services.

Both are 24 years old, a part of the story that’s received probably too much attention. For his part, McCrory seized upon that criticism with the bizarre argument that he could not discriminate against his former campaigners because of their ages. He says they competed for the positions and beat out older candidates for the high-salaried jobs.

Paying back election staffers and campaign operatives with government jobs, as we said before, isn’t uncommon but is most certainly unseemly. An Associated Press database of state-paid employees finds a handful who attained jobs after working on the McCrory campaign in one capacity or another. And unmerited promotions or raises at a time when others in government-paid positions — like teachers, for example — are receiving no raises at all is simply wrong.

The governor should practice what he preached during his campaign. Fiscal responsibility only works in government if it’s followed by all.